A paining titled "Icon of the Mother of God, queen of Peace" by Dorothy Thayne hangs in the renovated Miller Chapel as various construction projects at Lebanon Valley College continue on Thursday, July 21, 2016. Jeremy Long, Lebanon Daily News

Mary Green Hall, a dorm at Lebanon Valley College, is currently being renovated as various construction projects at Lebanon Valley College continue on Thursday, July 21, 2016. Jeremy Long, Lebanon Daily News

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The Shankroft Tennis Center is currently under construction as various construction projects at Lebanon Valley College continue on Thursday, July 21, 2016. (Photo: Jeremy Long, Lebanon Daily News)Buy Photo

Several buildings on the Lebanon Valley College campus are undergoing some major interior face-lifts, and the face of the campus itself is undergoing some changes, as well.

The Mary Green Residence Hall and Bishop Library are currently seeing some construction work done, and Miller Chapel has had a thorough interior face-lift. Additionally, the tennis courts are being converted into a full tennis center, and, in the near future, a new walkway will be added to make it possible for students in wheelchairs to cross the campus without ever having to get into a car.

Financially, the biggest project is the Mary Green Residence Hall renovation which has a $3 million price tag, according to Don Santostefano, senior director of facilities management at Lebanon Valley College (LVC).

“Part of those upgrades involve the commitment we made almost 10 years ago to install sprinkler systems in our existing residence halls even though the state of Pennsylvania does not require us to do that,” Santostefano said. “We wanted to upgrade the safety in all of our residence halls.”

While they are working on the plumbing for the sprinkler system, work is also being done on the building’s bathrooms and heating and cooling ventilation systems.

“It is really a matter of taking our existing residence halls, which date from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and bringing them up to current standards for comfort and safety,” Santostefano said.

Because students will be returning to the campus the first week in August, Santostefano and his crew have a very small window to work to get all the upgrades done.

“We started the day after our commencement around May 15, and we have to have it ready by the first week of August,” he said. “We are on schedule. We don’t really have a choice.”

While the residence hall is getting needed upgrades, the entire first floor of the Bishop Library is getting remodeled.

“The library became Bishop Library in 1995 when the original 1960-era library was completely gutted and added on to,” Santostefano said. “It served us well for more than 20 years, and we identified improvements that we wished to make to bring it up to the way libraries are used now because their use has changed significantly.”

The $1.7 million project, funded exclusively by donations from the Bishop family, will involve removing all books from the first floor of the building, and replacing the shelves with more collaboration areas, study rooms and a new classroom. These spaces will include technology such as interactive projection screens so a group of students working on a project can work together with relative ease, according to Santostefano.

There are five individual rooms that will be a combination of individual study room and collaboration room where groups can come together to work jointly on a paper, Santostefano said. However, some open space in the library will also be capable of being turned into group study areas.

“We have some other spaces that are not defined by walls, but are in the open area on the first floor that will have technology and furniture on wheels that will allow for groups to move things around and turn them into collaboration areas, as well,” Santostefano said. “If you wanted to try to put a number on it, I’d call it about 10 spaces on the first floor.”

A small coffee shop will also be a key feature to the new first floor of the library. However, the true centerpiece of the project involves the building’s vaulted ceiling.

“As you walk into our library, there is a vaulted ceiling that runs almost the entire length of the first floor,” Santostefano said. “What we are having installed by a company called Calypso is a fabric that will cover the surface of the vaulted ceiling, and we went to faculty and administrators and asked for excerpts from classic books from different academic disciplines, so you’ll actually be able to read these excerpts being projected onto the vaulted ceiling.”

This project could not have been done without financial aid provided by donations from the Bishop family, according to Marty Parkes, LVC’s director of marketing and communications.

“Their family has been very involved for decades now with the school and with the library,” Parkes said.

Santostefano agreed.

“This project would not have happened without their generosity,” he said. “The work on Mary Green is being funded by college operating funds, but the library is entirely through a donation from the Bishops.”

Another project being fully funded by donations is the Shankroft Tennis Center, a $530,000 project, which is taking six existing tennis courts and reconfiguring them, putting up lights on three of the courts, adding a pavilion with a hard surface area for gathering and a restroom with a composting toilet.

“The tennis center will be all Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessible,” Santostefano said. “It will be a very inviting area and a wonderful addition to the campus that took a relatively modest tennis area and is turning it into a real tennis center.”

A new walkway will be getting installed near the tennis courts thanks to the nearby Route 934 construction project being conducted by PennDOT.

“There is going to be an 8-foot wide walkway from Sheridan Avenue up across the railroad bridge to the north side of the bridge,” Santostefano said. “We are developing a connection between the end of their walkway on the north side of the bridge and our existing walkway on Arnold Field to the east.”

This will take care of a longstanding problem on the campus.

“For the first time ever, someone in a wheelchair or on a bicycle will be able to get from one side of our campus to the other without having to get into a car, and that has been a sore spot for us for quite some time,” Santostefano said.

The area below the walkway, which has to be elevated using fill to meet the height of Route 934, will create a natural amphitheater that Santostefano believes will be put to good use.

“The possibilities of what people might find to do with that area once we develop it are practically endless,” he said. “When you are on the north side of that, you’ll have a large lawn area, and then this gentle bank coming up with the tennis center on the other side, so it is really a great area that was just a field and tennis courts before.”

The other big project that just recently finished on the campus is the interior upgrade to Miller Chapel.

“The chapel was built in 1966, and had never had any upgrades to it,” Santostefano said. “It was certainly tired looking, wasn’t very pleasant in many ways and was underutilized over the past few years.”

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Contractors work on renovating Bishop Library as various construction projects at Lebanon Valley College continue on Thursday, July 21, 2016. (Photo: Jeremy Long, Lebanon Daily News)

Santostefano and his team transformed the chapel, which can seat around 1,000 people, into a space that can have multiple uses.

“We more than doubled the size of what was a small, raised altar area in the front, and changed it into a stage that can also serve as an altar area,” he explained. “We put in a wonderful high-tech audio and video system to do any kind of a presentation for conferences, professional events and anything you may need a large venue to do a presentation or conference in.”

The $900,000 project was also funded through donations made to the school.

“We believe that the chapel will see significantly more utilization by our campus community, and I think it may get some use from outsiders for weddings and things of that nature, as well,” Santostefano said.

Santostefano and LVC are also in the design phase for the Jeanne and Edward H. Arnold Health Professions Pavilion, a 61,000-square-foot building that will house the physical therapy program, athletic training program and exercise science program, and they are going to begin a speech pathology program in 2017 that will eventually move into the building, too.

“We are about halfway through the design process,” Santostefano said. “At this point, our project schedule has us bidding the project in Jan. 2017, breaking ground in March of the same year and occupying the building in May 2018.”